Anti-gay-marriage donations are rare in the Valley

On the heels of the news that Mozilla’s CEO-for-a-minute Brendan Eich has resigned following criticism over a Proposition 8 campaign donation, Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight decided to look into just how rare similar donations are in Silicon Valley.

It turns out that they are pretty rare. Silver mined a Los Angeles Times database of contributions for and against the anti-gay-marriage proposition, hunting for donors working at Silicon Valley tech firms listed in the Fortune 500.

Google had the strongest number of donations that opposed Proposition 8, with 341 employees donating more than $350,000 to oppose it. That means 97 percent of Google Proposition 8-related donations went opposed the ban.

Intel, on the other hand, had the most donations of those companies supporting the gay marriage ban: 60 percent of the employees who made donations gave in support of Proposition 8. They also far outspent their ideological opponents at the company, donating about $81,000 compared to about $10,000.

Only four donors listed said they worked at Mozilla. And among them, Eich was the only one who supported it.